Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618787172 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
787172TCR0010.1177/1362480618787172Theoretical CriminologyCarrabine
research-article2018
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(3) 445 –467
Geographies of landscape:
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meaning
Eamonn Carrabine
University of Essex, UK
Abstract
Green criminology has sought to blur the nature–culture binary and this article seeks to
extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding
of the shifting contours of the divide. The article begins by setting out these different
approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded
in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were
reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the 19th century and how the
world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture.
Keywords
Criminology, culture, geography, nature, photography
The last 20 years have seen the emergence of two distinct perspectives in criminology:
green criminology and cultural criminology. The potential for convergence was identi-
fied early on by South (1998) in his account of green cultural politics, in White’s (2002)
linking of environmental harm to the political economy of capitalist consumption and in
Brisman’s (2010) analysis of the criminalization of environmentally beneficial activities.
More recently, there have been attempts to develop green cultural criminological per-
spectives to understand the significance of various representations of environmental
crime and harm (e.g. Brisman, 2017; Brisman and South, 2013, 2014; Ferrell, 2013;
Corresponding author:
Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, CO4
3SQ, UK.
Email: eamonn@essex.ac.uk
446
Theoretical Criminology 22(3)
Natali, 2016; South, 2017). This article seeks to add to these efforts by addressing the
‘spatial turn’ that has been so pronounced across disciplines ranging from anthropology
to religious studies (Hayward, 2012: 443). Yet, given that space is one of the defining
units of criminological analysis, it has occupied a strangely passive role in the disci-
pline—the stage on which the drama unfolds—and this is indicative of the Kantian sepa-
ration of geography from history, where the former is defined in relation to ‘description
and space’ and the latter to ‘narration and time’ (Mitchell, 2011: 72). In this article, I want
to consider the ‘agency of space’ and the kind of ‘imaginative geographies’ (Gustafsson,
2013: 149) that emerge from the close scrutiny of landscapes.
For most geographers, landscape is a core idea, as it speaks to one of the discipline’s
defining interests, which is the relationship between the natural environment and human
society, in all its bewildering complexity. This article begins by setting out these argu-
ments in more detail, before turning to how the medium of photography offers distinctive
ways of seeing the global consequences of the use and abuse of landscape. The photog-
raphy of place has become increasingly political, not just in terms of documenting
destructive environmental change, but in thinking through the very politics of represen-
tation. Although many ecologically orientated artists are ‘aware of local–global connec-
tions, few artists are equipped to do more than comment on them’ (Lippard, 1997: 183)
and are frequently condemned for making pictures as sublimely beautiful as their prede-
cessors, even when they focus on climatic catastrophes (see generally Brisman, this
issue). Consequently, this article is not especially concerned with a history of nature and
the landscape, but rather with how geography connects us to what the photographer John
Gossage calls the ‘past as present’ (quoted in Badger, 2014: 161)—a radical reversal of
what photography normally does.
Of course, recent developments in visual criminology (charted in Brown and
Carrabine, 2017) have also drawn attention to how images are shaping the social world
and the discipline itself. From this perspective, important work has emerged exploring
carceral landscapes (Moran, 2015; Schept, 2015; Story, 2016) and has challenged crimi-
nology to confront how it understands the question of colonialism (Cunneen and Tauri,
2016). I have also sought to examine the dynamic of spectacle and surveillance, the mix-
ing of means of communication with those of destruction, in modern forms of warfare
(Carrabine,in press). This article builds on these developments and addresses the nature
of landscape. For Stephen Daniels, the potential of the term ‘landscape’ arises from its
‘duplicity’—‘not despite its difficulty as a comprehensive or reliable concept, but
because of it’; the implication is that we ‘should beware of attempts to define landscape,
to resolve its contradictions; rather we should abide in its duplicity’ (quoted in Matless,
2014: 6). In a series of influential publications, David Matless (1998, 2014, 2017) has
drawn out the tensions between different ‘cultures of landscape’ and how they forge
certain forms of human conduct, weaving through more temporal processes of history
and memory. The ‘duplicity’ of landscape is what gives it such analytical purchase, con-
veying ‘depth and surface, solid earth and superficial scenery, the ontological and the
ideological’, yet ‘impossible to place on either side of a dualism of nature and culture’
(Matless, 1998: 12). Green criminology has sought to blur the nature–culture binary and
this article seeks to extend recent work on geographies of landscape to further our under-
standing of the shifting contours of the divide.
Carrabine
447
Horizons
Landscape has long been closely associated in geography with culture—‘the idea of vis-
ible forms on the earth’s surface and their composition’ (Cosgrove, 1988/2008: 178,
emphasis in original)—and so for some, landscape is a text to be read, inseparable from
signifying practices enabling us to make sense of our worlds, while others push the meta-
phor further, revealing how landscapes are authored, made and orchestrated for the spec-
tacle of human life. In contrast, different approaches attend to how landscapes are
produced by the material power dynamics of capitalist accumulation and result from
basic inequalities between the classes. A leading exponent of this more Marxist under-
standing of social relations is Don Mitchell (1996), who has explored how the pictur-
esque Californian landscape masks the significant amount of struggle, toil and hard work
that lies behind the scenes, especially as rooted in the exploitative agricultural industry
built on the backs of migratory labour. In fact, much of the work performed by landscape
is an ongoing process of hiding that fundamental feature of exploitation, by naturalizing
it and legitimating certain kinds of landownership.
Of course, it is not just unequal class relations that are sustained through representa-
tions of landscape; so, too, are relations of gender, nation, sexuality and race experienced
and expressed through enduring social processes. To take gender, Gillian Rose (1993)
subjected human geography to withering critique, exposing the overarching masculinism
in the discipline and noting how the tradition of visuality in it (learning from looking in
the field) has frequently led to the conflation of seeing with knowing. Fieldwork is con-
demned for creating a distance between the viewer and viewed, associating it with a
problematic male gaze, so that in ‘geographical discourse, landscapes are often seen in
terms of the female body and the beauty of Nature’ (Rose, 1993: 87). Connected to this
privileging of masculine over feminine knowledge is the construction of a culture–nature
dualism that pervades both social science and aesthetic writing, while Rose’s notion of
‘paradoxical space’ has opened new ways of acknowledging the difference of others
(Mahtani, 2001) and non-human animals (Goyes and Sollund, this issue; Sollund, 2017).
Difference in all of its many, and frequently intersecting, forms is tied closely to
issues of access—where questions of belonging and exclusion assume significant spatial
dimensions. The work of Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Edward Said and Gayatari Spivak are
among the thinkers highlighting diverse processes of othering, positionality and situated
knowledges; it remains the case, however, that ‘geographers have still to break out of the
tradition of fetishizing the margins and ignoring the centre’ (Hopkins and Pain, 2007:
287). Of course, geography has played a pivotal role in imperialism (Godlewska and
Smith, 1994) and diffusing a colonial logic of the world (Blaut, 1993). Whether it was
through the Bible or the bayonet, western powers exercised control over conquered ter-
ritories and geographical knowledge was intimately tied to the project of empire (Driver,
2000). There have been many attempts to examine critically these relationships and here
I concentrate on one significant strand exploring the ties between imperialism—under-
stood as the practice of wielding political and economic control over foreign territories—
and the constitution of landscapes in them. In so doing, I draw inspiration from WJT
Mitchell’s (2002a: 7) influential essay on ‘Imperial landscape’, which questioned three
fundamental assumptions that...
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